The American musical, an art form in trouble in the 1980s, lost one of its master professionals Saturday when Alan Jay Lerner, the lyricist and librettist for some of the musical theater's most sophisticated and enduring works, died of lung cancer in New York at 67. For about a decade, until the beginning of the 1960s, Mr. Lerner and his partner, composer Frederick Loewe, stood at the summit of the Broadway and Hollywood musical, their collaboration having...

There's a full-on "Brigadoon" up in bonnie Evanston, replete with bagpipes, heather, tartans, warbling laddies and lassies and even a wee fog machine backstage belching out some of that special highland mist. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. They are not, alas, selling one of my favorite Scottish products in the lobby of the Cahn Auditorium — the rules of prohibition die hard on a very different northerly shore — but the 24-piece orchestra in the pit and any score by Alan...

During the late '40s, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick "Fritz" Loewe established themselves as a powerful Broadway musical duo with the critically acclaimed "Brigadoon," and many other much-loved classics followed. During "An Evening of Lerner and Loewe," Maestro Robert L. Hanson conducts the Elgin Symphony Orchestra as they play a selection of hits from Oscar-winning musicals such as "Camelot," "Paint Your Wagon," "Gigi" and "My Fair Lady"; the Elgin Choral Union Arts Chorale, soprano Karyn Stewart, tenor Timothy...

'My Fair Lady' . Eliza Doolittle really doesn't want all that much: just the chance to be "a lady in a flower shop," rather than hawking her petals on a Covent Garden street corner. But in the hands of the actress Heidi Kettenring, Eliza's desire for a little class mobility is expressed with such exuberance and determination, such sumptuous vocal expression, you think that you are in for a Marriott Theatre "My Fair Lady" to remember. It does not play out...

Live concerts will be returning to Drury Lane Water Tower Place, at 175 E. Chestnut St., starting next month. The venue where Tony Bennett, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz stars once performed will spotlight Chicago vocalists on Feb. 18 for "My Fair Cabaret," featuring the music of Frank Loesser, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. "My Fair Cabaret," running on a Monday night, will not interfere with Drury Lane's current production, "Altar Boyz." The concert...

Sex and the City of Light are the twin obsessions of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's "Gigi," which is as it should be for a story by Colette, that peerless portraitist of Parisian courtesans and playboys. But in watching Light Opera Works' revival of this 1973 stage musical, itself adapted from the 1958 Vincente Minnelli film, one thinks more of Edwardian England than the Belle Epoque. So many of the songs, as well as the story line, feel familiar from Lerner and Loewe's 1956 smash "My Fair Lady"...

Put together Alan Jay Lerner and Allan Carr, add a few ingredients such as a director and a couple of stars, bake for seven or eight months and the confection that emerges should be "My Man Godfrey," a musical comedy based on the 1936 film classic. The man who was one of the creators of "My Fair Lady" and "Camelot" and the man who is the producer of "La Cage aux Folles" hope to have their theatrical version of the movie on Broadway sometime next December. Lerner will be working...

The reviews were smashing when Trevor Nunn's revival of "My Fair Lady" opened in London in 2001; a tour based on that production is now at the Cadillac Palace Theatre. The musical, created by Lerner and Loewe and produced by Cameron Macintosh, centers on an upper-class language professor and the cockney flower girl he transforms into an elegant woman with impeccable speech and manners to match -- the "Extreme Makeover" of its time. 1. The show debuted on Broadway in 1956 and ran...

Irene Dunne, Bob Hope, Beverly Sills, dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham and the songwriting team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe are the six who made the list for the eighth annual Kennedy Center Awards honors. The awards, announced by the Washington-based Center for the Performing Arts, will be given at the center's board of trustees dinner Dec. 7. That will be followed by a performance at the Opera House on Dec. 8, which President Reagan plans to attend. The program will be taped...

Live concerts will be returning to Drury Lane Water Tower Place, at 175 E. Chestnut St., starting next month. The venue where Tony Bennett, Pearl Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald and other jazz stars once performed will spotlight Chicago vocalists on Feb. 18 for "My Fair Cabaret," featuring the music of Frank Loesser, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. "My Fair Cabaret," running on a Monday night, will not interfere with Drury Lane's current production, "Altar Boyz." The concert...

Irene Dunne, Bob Hope, Beverly Sills, dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham and the songwriting team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe are the six who made the list for the eighth annual Kennedy Center Awards honors. The awards, announced by the Washington-based Center for the Performing Arts, will be given at the center's board of trustees dinner Dec. 7. That will be followed by a performance at the Opera House on Dec. 8, which President Reagan plans to attend. The program will be taped for...

"The second act," observes the genial Michael York, star of "Camelot," "has always been a bit of a mess." This is a cheering bit of candor from the British actor. Usually, the star of a touring version of this popular and allegorical perennial feels an obligation to wax lyrical on how we all yearn for a time when leaders (and their wives) were decent, charismatic and camera-ready. "Camelot," at once a love story set in King Arthur's kingdom and a parable about the Kennedy...

The man whose lyrics to "My Fair Lady" are lodged on the moon for posterity--Alan Jay Lerner--has been commissioned to write an official lullaby for Prince Harry. Lerner, 65, whose musicals include "Gigi," "Camelot," and "Paint Your Wagon," was immortalized when his lyrics to "My Fair Lady" were dumped on the moon in 1971 by Apollo XIV astronaut Edgar Mitchell. The significance of this act has never fully been explained, but it vaulted Lerner into a position where he...

Of all the cultural appropriations in Broadway history, few are as outrageous as "Brigadoon," that silly Scottish-themed fantasy musical from 1947 wherein a couple of cynics from New York are seduced by too much heather, too many men in kilts and too many hearty young women seductively wrapping their tongues around "och," "wee" and "aye." Had Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe set their little pastoral jig -- about an 18th Century town that only pops out of the mist every 100 years...

One More Rose (Jackie Cain and Roy Kral; Audiophile). This tribute to the lyrics of the late Alan Jay Lerner may well be Jackie and Roy's finest album, which is saying a lot because that elegantly swinging vocal duo has never made a recording that was less than excellent. The quality of the songs, by Lerner and Frederick Loewe, and by Lerner and Burton Lane, is part of what makes "One More Rose" exceptional; durably familiar pieces ("I`ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face, "On a...

`Brigadoon," more than a half-century old, stands as one of the brightest of shows in the golden age of American musical theater. Created in 1947 by composer Frederick Loewe and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, this romantic fantasy tells the story of a successful young businessman who, searching for the girl of his dreams, abandons the frustration of his mundane urban world and joins the simple folk in an enchanted Scottish village. (In 1999, he'd probably join "Fight Club.") ...

During the late '40s, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick "Fritz" Loewe established themselves as a powerful Broadway musical duo with the critically acclaimed "Brigadoon," and many other much-loved classics followed. During "An Evening of Lerner and Loewe," Maestro Robert L. Hanson conducts the Elgin Symphony Orchestra as they play a selection of hits from Oscar-winning musicals such as "Camelot," "Paint Your Wagon," "Gigi" and "My Fair Lady"; the Elgin Choral Union Arts Chorale, soprano Karyn Stewart, tenor Timothy...